Lord Ormont and his Aminta, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> Lord Ormont and his Aminta, Complete

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"We take the Solers for granted, aunty, good night."

"Commoners, if you like; but established since the Conquest. That is, we
trace the pedigree. And to be treated, even by a great nobleman, as if we
were stuff picked up out of the ditch! I declare, there are times when I
sit and think and boil. Is it chivalrous, is it generous--is it, I say,
decent--is it what Alfred would have called a fair fulfilment of a pact,
for your wedded husband--? You may close my mouth! But he pretends to be
chivalrous and generous, and he has won a queen any wealthy gentleman in
England--I know of one, if not two--would be proud to have beside him in
equal state; and what is he to her? He is an extinguisher. Or is it the
very meanest miserliness, that he may keep you all to himself? There we
are again! I say he is an unreadable sphinx."

Aminta had rung the bell for her maid. Mrs. Pagnell could be counted on
for drawing in her tongue when the domestics were near.

A languor past delivery in sighs was on the young woman's breast. She
could have heard without a regret that the heart was to cease beating.
Had it been downright misery she would have looked about her with less of
her exanimate glassiness. The unhappy have a form of life: until they are
worn out, they feel keenly. She felt nothing. The blow to her pride of
station and womanhood struck on numbed sensations. She could complain
that the blow was not heavier.

A letter lying in her jewel-box called her to read it, for the chance of
some slight stir. The contents were known. The signature of Adolphus
Morsfield had a new meaning for her eyes, and dashed her at her husband
in a spasm of revolt and wrath against the man exposing her to these
letters, which a motion of her hand could turn to blood, and abstention
from any sign maintained in a Satanic whisper, saying, "Here lies one way
of solving the riddle." It was her husband who drove her to look that
way.

The look was transient, and the wrath: she could not burn. A small
portion of contempt lodged in her mind to shadow husbands precipitating
women on their armoury for a taste of vengeance. Women can always be
revenged--so speedily, so completely: they have but to dip. Husbands
driving wives to taste their power execrate the creature for her fall
deep downward. They are forgetful of causes.

Does it matter? Aminta's languor asked. The letter had not won a reply.
Thought of the briefest of replies was a mountain of effort, and she
moaned at her nervelessness in body and mind. To reply, to reproach the
man, to be flame--an image of herself under the form she desired--gave
her a momentary false energy, wherein the daring of the man, whose life
was at a loss for the writing of this letter, hung lighted. She had
therewith a sharp vision of his features, repellent in correctness, Greek
in lines, with close eyes, hollow temples, pressed lips--a face
indicating the man who can fling himself on a die. She had heard tales of
women and the man. Some had loved him, report said. Here were words to
say that he loved her. They might, poor man, be true. Otherwise she had
never been loved.

Memory had of late been paying visits to a droopy plant in the golden
summer drought on a gorgeous mid-sea island, and had taken her on board
to refresh her with voyages, always bearing down full sail on a couple of
blissful schools, abodes of bloom and briny vigour, sweet merriment,
innocent longings, dreams the shyest, dreams the mightiest. At night
before sleep, at morn before rising, often during day, and when vexed or
when dispirited, she had issued her command for the voyage. Sheer
refreshment followed, as is ever the case if our vessel carries no
freight of hopes. There could be no hopes. It was forgotten that they had
ever been seriously alive. But it carried an admiration. Now, an
admiration may endure, and this one had been justified all round. The
figure heroical, the splendid, active youth, hallowed Aminta's past. The
past of a bitterly humiliated Aminta was a garden in the coming kiss of
sunset, with that godlike figure of young manhood to hallow it. There he
stayed, perpetually assuring her of his triumphs to come.

She could have no further voyages. Ridicule convulsed her home of refuge.
For the young soldier-hero, to be unhorsed by misfortune, was one thing;
but the meanness of the ambition he had taken in exchange for the thirst
of glory, accused his nature. He so certainly involved her in the
burlesque of the transformation that she had to quench memory.

She was, therefore, having smothered a good part of herself, accountably
languid--a condition alternating with fire in Aminta; and as Mr.
Morsfield's letter supplied the absent element, her needy instinct pushed
her to read his letter through. She had not yet done that with attention.

Whether a woman loves a man or not, he is her lover if he dare tell her
he loves her, and is heard with attention. Aware that the sentences were
poison, she summoned her constitutional antagonism to the mad step
proposed, so far nullifying the virus as to make her shrink from the
madness. Even then her soul cried out to her husband, Who drives me to
read? or rather, to brood upon what she read. The brooding ensued, was
the thirst of her malady. The best antidote she could hit on was the
writer's face. Yet it expressed him, his fire and his courage--gifts she
respected in him, found wanting in herself. Read by Lord Ormont, this
letter would mean a deadly thing.

Aminta did her lord the justice to feel sure of him, that with her name
bearing the superscription, it might be left on her table, and world not
have him to peruse it. If he manoeuvred, it was never basely. Despite
resentment, her deepest heart denied his being indifferent either to her
honour or his own in relation to it. He would vindicate both at a stroke,
for a sign. Nevertheless, he had been behaving cruelly. She charged on
him the guilt of the small preludes, archeries, anglings, veilings,
evasions, all done with the eyelids and the mute of the lips, or a
skirmisher word or a fan's flourish, and which, intended to pique the
husband rather than incite the lover, had led Mrs. Lawrence Finchley to
murmur at her ear, in close assembly, without a distinct designation of
Mr. Morsfield, "Dangerous man to play little games with!" It had brought
upon her this letter of declaration, proposal, entreaty.

This letter was the man's life in her hands, and safe, of course. But
surely it was a proof that the man loved her?

Aminta was in her five-and-twentieth year; when the woman who is
uncertain of the having been loved, and she reputed beautiful, desirable,
is impelled by a sombre necessity to muse on a declaration, and nibble at
an idea of a test. If "a dangerous man to play little games with," he
could scarcely be dangerous to a woman having no love for him at all. It
meant merely that he would soon fall to writing letters like this, and he
could not expect an answer to it. But her heart really thanked him, and
wished the poor gentleman to take its dumb response as his reward, for
being the one sole one who had loved her.

Aminta dwelt on "the one sole one." Lord Ormont's treatment had detached
her from any belief in love on his part; and the schoolboy, now ambitions
to become a schoolmaster, was behind the screen unlikely to be lifted
again by a woman valuing her pride of youth, though he had--behold our
deceptions!--the sympathetic face entirely absent from that of Mr.
Adolphus Morsfield, whom the world would count quite as handsome--nay, it
boasted him. He enjoyed the reputation of a killer of ladies. Women have
odd tastes, Aminta thought, and examined the gentleman's handwriting. It
pleased her better. She studied it till the conventional phrases took a
fiery hue, and came at her with an invasive rush.

The letter was cast back into the box, locked up; there an end to it, or
no interdiction of sleep.

Sleep was a triumph. Aminta's healthy frame rode her over petty
agitations of a blood uninflamed, as lightly as she swam the troubled
sea-waters her body gloried to cleave. She woke in the morning peaceful
and mildly reflective, like one who walks across green meadows. Only by
degrees, by glimpses, was she drawn to remember the trotting, cantering,
galloping, leaping of an active heart during night. We cannot, men or
woman, control the heart in sleep at night. There had been wild leapings.
Night will lead an unsatisfied heart of a woman, by way of sleep, to
scale black mountains, jump jagged chasms. Sleep is a horse that laughs
at precipices and abysses. We bid women, moreover, be all heart. They are
to cultivate their hearts, pay much heed to their hearts. The vast realm
of feeling is open to these appointed keepers of the sanctuary household,
who may be withering virgins, may be childless matrons, may be
unhusbanded wives. Wandering in the vast realm which they are exhorted to
call their own, for the additional attractiveness it gives them, an
unsatisfied heart of woman will somewhat audaciously cross the borderland
a single step into the public road of the vast realm of thinking. Once
there, and but a single step on the road, she is a rebel against man's
law for her sex. Nor is it urgent on her that she should think defiantly
in order to feel herself the rebel. She may think submissively; with a
heart (the enlarged, the scientifically plumped, the pasture of epicurean
man), with her coveted heart in revolt, and from the mere act of thinking
at all.

Aminta reviewed perforce, dead against her will, certain of the
near-to-happiness ratings over-night. She thinned her lips, and her
cheeks glowed. An arm, on the plea of rescuing, had been round her. The
choice now offered her was, to yield to softness or to think. She took
the latter step, the single step of an unaccustomed foot, which women
educated simply to feet, will, upon extreme impulsion, take; and it held
a candle in a windy darkness. She saw no Justice there. The sensational
immensity touched sublime, short of that spirit of Justice required for
the true sublime. And void of Justice; what a sunless place is any realm!
Infants, the male and the female alike, first begin to know they feel
when it is refused them. When they know they feel, they have begun to
reflect. The void of Justice is a godless region. Women, to whom the
solitary thought has come as a blown candle, illumining the fringes of
their storm, ask themselves whether they are God's creatures or man's.
The question deals a sword-stroke of division between them and their
human masters. Young women, animated by the passions their feeling bosoms
of necessity breed, and under terror discover, do not distinguish an
abstract justice from a concrete. They are of the tribe too long
hereditarily enslaved to conceive an abstract. So it is with them, that
their God is the God of the slave, as it is with all but the bravest of
boys. He is a Thing to cry to, a Punisher, not much of a Supporter--the
Biblical Hebrew's right reading of Nature, favouring man, yet prompt to
confound him, and with woman for the instrument of vengeance. By such a
maze the blindfolded, are brought round to see Justice on earth. If women
can only believe in some soul of justice, they will feel they belong to
God--of the two; and the peril for them then is, that they will set the
one incomprehensible Power in opposition to the other, urging them
unsatisfied natures to make secret appeal away from man and his laws
altogether, at the cost of losing clear sight of the God who shines in
thought. It is a manner whereby the desperately harried among these
creatures of the petted heart arrive upon occasion at an agreeable,
almost reposeful, contemplation of the reverse of God.

There is little pleasure to be on the lecture-rostrum for a narrator
sensible to the pulses of his audience. Justice compels at times. In
truth, there are times when the foggy obscurities of the preacher are by
comparison broad daylight beside the whirling loose tissues of a woman
unexplained. Aminta was one born to prize rectitude, to walk on the
traced line uprightly; and while the dark rose overflowed the soft brown
of her cheeks, under musings upon her unlicenced heart's doings
overnight, she not only pleaded for woeful creatures of her sex burdened
as she and erring, she weighed them in the scales with men, and put her
heart where Justice pointed, sending men to kick aloft.

Her husband, the man-riddle: she was unable to rede or read him. Her will
could not turn him; nor her tongue combat; nor was it granted her to
pique the mailed veteran. Every poor innocent little bit of an art had
been exhausted. Her title was Lady Ormont her condition actually slave. A
luxuriously established slave, consorting with a singularly enfranchised
set,--as, for instance, Mrs. Lawrence Finchley and Lord Adderwood; Sir
John Randeller and Lady Staines; Mrs. May, Amy May, notorious wife of a
fighting captain, the loneliest of blondes; and other ladies, other
gentlemen, Mr. Morsfield in the list, paired or not yet paired: gossip
raged. Aminta was of a disposition too generously cordial to let her be
the rigorous critic of people with whom she was in touch. But her mind
knew relief when she recollected that her humble little school-mate,
Selina Collect, who had suffered on her behalf in old days, was coming up
to her from the Suffolk coast on a visit for a week. However much a slave
and an unloved woman, she could be a constant and protecting friend.
Besides, Lord Ormont was gracious to little Selina. She thought of his
remarks about the modest-minded girl after first seeing her. From that
she struck upon a notion of reserves of humaneness being in him, if she
might find the path to them: and thence, fortified by the repose her
picture of little Selina's merit had bestowed, she sprang to the idea of
valiancy, that she would woo him to listen to her, without inflicting a
scene. He had been a listening lover, seeming lover, once, later than the
Granada sunsets. The letter in her jewel-box urged Aminta to clear her
conscience by some means, for leaving it unburnt.

CHAPTER VII.

EXHIBITS EFFECTS OF A PRATTLER'S DOSES

The rules in Lord Ormont's household assisted to shelter him for some
hours of the day from the lady who was like a blast of sirocco under his
roof. He had his breakfast alone, as Lady Charlotte had it at Olmer; a
dislike of a common table in the morning was a family trait with both. At
ten o'clock the secretary arrived, and they were shut up together. At the
luncheon table Aminta usually presided. If my lord dined at home, he had
by that time established an equanimity rendering, his constant civility
to Mrs. Pagnell less arduous. The presence of a woman of tongue,
perpetually on the spring to gratify him and win him, was among the
burdens he bore for his Aminta.

Mrs. Pagnell soon perceived that the secretary was in favour. My lord and
this Mr. Weyburn had their pet themes of conversation, upon which the
wary aunt of her niece did not gaze like the wintry sun with the distant
smile her niece displayed over discussions concerning military
biographies, Hannibal's use of his elephants and his Numidian horse, the
Little St. Bernard, modern artillery, ancient slingers, English and
Genoese bowmen, Napoleon's tactics, his command to the troopers to "give
point," and English officers' neglect of sword exercise, and the "devil
of a day" Old England is to have on a day to come. My lord connected our
day of trial with India. Mrs. Pagnell assumed an air of studious
interest; she struck in to give her niece a lead, that Lord Ormont might
know his countess capable of joining the driest of subjects occupying
exalted minds. Aminta did not follow her; and she was extricated
gallantly by the gentlemen in turn.

The secretary behaved with a pretty civility. Aminta shook herself to
think tolerantly of him when he, after listening to the suggestion, put
interrogatively, that we should profit by Hannibal's example and train
elephants to serve as a special army corps for the perfect security of
our priceless Indian Empire, instanced the danger likely to result from
their panic fear of cannon, and forbore to consult Lord Ormont's eye.

Mrs. Pagnell knew that she had put her foot into it; but women advised of
being fools in what they say, are generally sustained by their sense of
the excellent motive which impelled them. Even to the Countess of Ormont,
she could have replied, "We might have given them a higher idea of
us"--if, that meant, the Countess of Ormont had entered the field beside
her, to the exclusion of a shrinking Aminta. She hinted as much
subsequently, and Aminta's consciousness of the troth was touched. The
young schoolmaster's company sat on her spirits, deadened her vocabulary.
Her aunt spoke of passing the library door and hearing the two gentlemen
loudly laughing. It seemed subserviency on the fallen young hero's part.
His tastes were low. He frequented the haunts of boxing men; her lord
informed her of his having made, or of his making, matches to run or swim
or walk certain distances against competitors or within a given time. He
had also half a dozen boys or more in tow, whom he raced out of town on
Sundays; a nucleus of the school he intended to form.

But will not Achilles become by comparison a common rushlight where was a
blazing torch, if we see him clap a clown's cap on the head whose golden
helm was fired by Pallas?

Nay, and let him look the hero still: all the more does he point finger
on his meanness of nature.

Turning to another, it is another kind of shame that a woman feels, if
she consents to an exchange of letters--shameful indeed, but not such a
feeling of deadly sickness as comes with the humiliating view of an
object of admiration degraded. Bad she may be; and she may be deceived,
vilely treated, in either case. And what is a woman's pride but the staff
and banner of her soul, beyond all gifts? He who wounds it cannot be
forgiven--never!--he has killed the best of her. Aminta found herself
sliding along into the sentiment, that the splendid idol of a girl's
worship is, if she discover him in the lapse of years as an
infinitesimally small one, responsible for the woman's possible reckless
fit of giddiness. And she could see her nonsense; she could not correct
it. Lines of the letters under signature of Adolphus were phosphorescent
about her: they would recur; and she charged their doing so on the
discovered meanness of the girl's idol. Her wicked memory was caused by
his having plunged her low.

Mrs. Pagnell performed the offices of attention to Mr. Weyburn in lieu of
the countess, who seemed to find it a task to sit at the luncheon table
with him, when Lady Ormont was absent. "Just peeped in," she said as she
entered the library, "to see if all was comfortable;" and gossip ensued,
not devoid of object. She extracted an astonishingly smooth description
of Lady Charlotte. Weyburn was brightness in speaking of the
much-misunderstood lady. "She's one of the living women of the world."

"You are sure you don't mean one of the worldly women?" Mrs. Pagnell
rejoiced.

"She has to be known to be liked," he owned.

"And you were, one hears, among the favoured?"

"I can scarcely pretend to that, ma'am."

"You were recommended."

"Lady Charlotte is devoted to her brother."

Mrs. Pagnell's bosom heaved. "How strange Lord Ormont is! One would
suppose, with his indignation at the country for its treatment of him,
admirers would be welcome. Oh dear, no! that is not the way. On board the
packet, on our voyage to Spain, my niece in her cabin, imploring mercy of
Neptune, as they say, I heard of Lord Ormont among the passengers. I
could hardly credit my ears. For I had been hearing of him from my niece
ever since her return from a select establishment for the education of
young ladies, not much more than a morning's drive out of London, though
Dover was my residence. She had got a hero! It was Lord Ormont! Lord
Ormont! all day: and when the behaviour of the country to him became
notorious, Aminta--my niece the countess--she could hardly contain
herself. A secret:--I promised her--it's not known to Lord Ormont
himself:--a printed letter in a metropolitan paper, copied into the
provincial papers, upholding him for one of the greatest of our patriot
soldiers and the saviour of India, was the work of her hands. You would,
I am sure, think it really well written. Meeting him on deck--the outline
of the coast of Portugal for an introductory subject, our Peninsular
battles and so forth--I spoke of her enthusiasm. The effect was, to cut
off all communication between us. I had only to appear, Lord Ormont
vanished. I said to myself, this is a character. However, the very
mention of him to my niece, as one of the passengers on board--medicine,
miraculous! She was up in half an hour, out pacing the deck before
evening, hardly leaning on my arm, and the colour positively beginning to
show on her cheeks again. He fled, of coarse. I had prepared her for his
eccentricities. Next morning she was out by herself. In the afternoon
Lord Ormont strode up to us his--military step--and most courteously
requested the honour of an introduction. I had broken the ice at last;
from that moment he was cordiality itself, until--I will not say, until
he had called her his own--a few little misunderstandings!--not with his
countess. You see, a resident aunt is translated mother-in-law by
husbands; though I spare them pretty frequently; I go to friends, they
travel. Here in London she must have a duenna. The marriage at Madrid, at
the Embassy:--well, perhaps it was a step for us, for commoners, though
we rank with the independent. Has her own little pin-money--an
inheritance. Perhaps Lady Eglett gives the world her version. She may
say, there was aiming at station. I reply, never was there a more
whole-hearted love-match! Absolutely the girl's heart has been his from
the period of her school-days. Oh! a little affair--she was persecuted by
a boy at a neighbouring school. Her mistress wrote me word--a very
determined Romeo young gentleman indeed--quite alarmed about him. In the
bud! I carried her off on the spot, and snapped it effectually. Warned he
meant to be desperate, I kept her away from my house at Dover four
months, place to place; and I did well. I heard on my return, that a
youth, answering to the schoolmistress's description of him, had been
calling several times, the first two months and longer. You have me
alluding to these little nonsensical nothings, because she seemed born to
create violent attachments, even at that early day; and Lady Eglett--Lady
Charlotte Eglett may hear; for there is no end to them, and impute them
to her, when really!--can she be made responsible for eyes innocent of
the mischief they appear destined to do? But I am disturbing you in your
work."

"You are very good, ma'am," said the ghost of the determined young
gentleman.

"A slight cold, have you?" Mrs. Pagnell asked solicitously.

"Dear me, no!" he gave answer with a cleared throat.

In charging him with more than he wanted to carry, she supplied him with
particulars he had wanted to know; and now he asked himself what could be
the gain of any amount of satisfied curiosity regarding a married Aminta.
She slew my lord on board a packet-boat; she bears the arrows that slay.
My lord married her where the first English chaplain was to be found;
that is not wonderful either. British Embassy, Madrid! Weyburn believed
the ceremony to have been performed there: at the same time, he could
hear Lady Charlotte's voice repeating with her varied intonation Mrs.
Pagnell's impressive utterances; and he could imagine how the somewhat
silly duenna aunt, so penetrable in her transparent artifices, struck
emphasis on the incredulity of people inclined to judge of the reported
ceremony by Lord Ormont's behaviour to his captive.

How explain that strange matter? But can there be a gain in trying to
sound it? Weyburn shuffled it away. Before the fit of passion seized him,
he could turn his eager mind from anything which had not a perceptible
point of gain, either for bodily strength or mental acquisition, or for
money, too, now that the school was growing palpable as an infant in arms
and agape for the breast. Thought of gain, and the bent to pursue it, is
the shield of Athene over young men in the press of the seductions. He
had to confess his having lost some bits of himself by reason of his
meditations latterly; and that loss, if we let it continue a space, will
show in cramp at the wrist, logs on the legs, a wheezy wind, for any
fellow vowed to physical trials of strength and skill. It will show
likewise in the brain beating broken wings--inability to shoot a thought
up out of the body for half a minute. And, good Lord! how quickly the
tight-strong fellow crumbles, when once the fragmentary disintegration
has begun! Weyburn cried out on a heart that bounded off at prodigal
gallops, and had to be nipped with reminders of the place of good leader
he was for taking among the young. Hang superexcellence! but we know
those moanings over the troubles of a married woman; we know their
sources, know their goal, or else we are the fiction-puppet or the
Bedlamite; and she is a married woman, married at the British Embassy,
Madrid, if you please! after a few weeks' acquaintance with her husband,
who doubtless wrote his name intelligibly in the registrar's book, but
does not prove himself much the hero when he drives a pen, even for so
little as the signing of his name! He signed his name, apparently not
more than partly pledging himself to the bond. Lord Ormont's
autobiographical scraps combined with Lady Charlotte's hints and Mrs.
Pagnell's communications, to provoke the secretary's literary contempt of
his behaviour to his wife. However, the former might be mended, and he
resumed the task.

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